At 7:07 PM +0000 6/5/01, delong at econ.berkeley.edu wrote:
>Why, then, did I look at this book after I finished it like I might
>look at a dangerous insect? Because of its politics--or, rather, its
>antipolitics. In this book the government does not appear (save in
>footnotes discussing the lack of enforcement of the Fair Labor
>Standards Act). Yet if you look at the things that make the lives of
>America's working poor better, the actions of government have to
>rank high on the list. The government sets and enforces
>(imperfectly) the minimum wage; contrary to what you would believe
>if you read only the footnotes, the Fair Labor Standards Act does
>change the way America's workplaces function; for those with kids,
>the Earned Income Tax Credit provides low-wage workers with a wage
>boost of forty cents on the dollar for each of their first fifteen
>hundred hours of work (if they file an income tax return with the
>IRS and claim it--a big if); what inadequate health care the working
>poor receive is paid for by the government; and if we are ever going
>to change the supply-demand balance of the American economy and
>significantly close the income gaps between working rich and working
>poor, publicly-funded education must play the major role.
>
>Yet all these are invisible to Barbara Ehrenreich
>
>Because all these are invisible to the Barbara Ehrenreich (see "When
>Government Gets Mean: Confessions of a Recovering Statist, _The
>Nation_ (November 17, 1997)), she can write that it is time for
>America's left to ditch the government. She believes that it is time
>to stop supporting it, to stop defending it, to stop arguing that
>what the government does is by and large good, to "...no longer let
>progressivism be understood as the defense of government." Why?
>Because "[b]y setting ourselves up as the defenders of... 'big
>government'... progressives have boxed themselves into a
>pragmatically and morally untenable position." To Ehrenreich,
>American government today is made up of "petty-minded bureaucracies
>like the I.R.S. and the D.M.V." when it is not made up of cops
>violating people's civil rights.
>
>So from her point of view, the right thing to do is not to care
>about electing representatives who will vote for expansions of the
>Earned Income Tax Credit and increases in the minimum wage, but to
>focus attention of "alternative services": "...squats, cooperatives
>of various kinds, community currency projects... [a cultural core]
>offering information, contacts, referrals and a place for people to
>gather."
>
>And from her point of view a Democratic victory in the 2000 election
>would have been something to fear, because of its "almost certainly
>debilitating effect on progressives and their organizations" (see
>"Vote for Nader," _The Nation_ (August 21/28, 2000)). Never mind
>that a Democratic Labor Secretary would place a higher priority on
>enforcing labor laws in a worker-friendly manner, never mind that
>under a Democratic president the NLRB is more union-friendly, never
>mind that a Democratic congress would pass and a Democratic
>president sign minimum wage increases that did not come with enough
>riders to make their overall benefit questionable, and never mind
>that under Democratic congresses and presidents the tax code becomes
>more progressive. None of these are on Ehrenreich's radar screen.
>
>Why not? I don't know. She's smart. She's an extremely skilled
>observer. She's witty and writes extremely well. The economists of
>the Economic Policy Institute had their chance to brief her.
>
>Yet it seems as though none of it took...